On 30 January
1948, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known around the world as Mahatma Gandhi,
and to his countrymen and women as Bapu, the “Father of the Nation”,
was shot dead by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a Chitpavan Brahmin from Pune.
Much ink has been spilled on determining whether Godse was, at that time,
a member of the RSS, or indeed of the Hindu Mahasabha, or perhaps of neither
organization. Though Godse single-handedly carried out the execution of
Gandhi, others were implicated in the assassination plot, and among those
against whom the Indian government filed charges was Veer Savarkar. Godse,
as investigations after Gandhi’s murder were to reveal, appears
to have been close to Savarkar, a prominent leader of the Hindu Mahasabha.
Godse was certainly a frequent visitor to Savarkar’s residence,
and he did not, in the time that intervened between his arrest on January
30 and his execution upon conviction of the charge of murder nearly two
years later, ever disown his association with the Mahasabha.

The general consensus appears to be that Nathuram,
who saw himself as a passionate and ardent defender of the Hindu motherland
against the depredations of Muslims, was at one point active in the RSS
but resigned his membership in the early 1930s. This mere fact, if fact
it be, has been pounced upon by the RSS in the five decades following
Gandhi’s assassination to argue that Godse had no association with
the RSS, and curiously Nathuram’s younger brother, Gopal Godse,
who was convicted of partaking in the conspiracy to murder Gandhi and
served a fifteen-year jail term and still speaks in the most bitter terms
of Gandhi as the betrayer of India, has himself on more than one occasion
had to issue a strong rejoinder to the RSS, with whose ideological outlook
he is otherwise in complete sympathy, for attempting to disguise his brother’s
long-term association with the RSS. Thus, shortly after releasing Nathuram’s
book, Why I Assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, in December 1993, Gopal Godse
in an interview with Frontline magazine stated: “All the [Godse]
brothers were in the RSS. Nathuram, Dattatreya, myself and Govind. You
can say we grew up in the RSS rather than in our home. It was like a family
to us. Nathuram had become a baudhik karyavah [intellectual worker] in
the RSS. He has said in his statement that he left the RSS. He said it
because [Madhav Sadashiv] Golwalkar and the RSS were in a lot of trouble
after the murder of Gandhi. But he did not leave the RSS.” [See
issue of 28 January 1994]

Whether Godse formally remained a member of the
RSS is much less important than the fact that though the Hindu Mahasabha
and the RSS had some ideological differences, both organizations were
united in their extreme hostility to Gandhi as well as to Muslims. Golwalkar
and Savarkar shared a platform in Pune in 1952, as Sitaram Yechury’s
What Is This Hindu Rashtra (Madras: Frontline Publications, 1993) has
recently documented, and it is a little-known fact that at one point the
RSS, eager to foment the impression that it did not stand by the virulently
anti-Muslim sentiments expressed in Golwalkar’s influential book,
We or Our Nationhood Defined (1938), claimed that the author of the book
was Babarao Savarkar, the brother of Veer Savarkar. Sardar Patel, the
Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet, was
himself inclined to view the Mahasabha and the RSS as organizations that
had together created an atmosphere in which, as he wrote on 18 July 1948
to the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Shyam Prasad Mookerjee, “such a ghastly
tragedy [Gandhi’s assassination] became possible. There is no doubt
in my mind that the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved
in this conspiracy.” Yet, as Patel added, in terms that leave no
room to doubt that from his standpoint the RSS also stood implicated in
Gandhi’s assassination, “The activities of the RSS constituted
a clear threat to the existence of Government and the State. Our reports
show that those activities, despite the ban, have not died down. Indeed,
as time has marched on, the RSS circles are becoming more defiant and
are indulging in their subversive activities in an increasing measure.”
Two months later, on September 11th, Patel was again unequivocal in his
denunciation of the role played by the RSS in Gandhi’s assassination:
addressing Golwalkar, Patel spoke about the “poison” spread
by the RSS. Following Gandhi’s murder, “Even an iota of the
sympathy of the Government or of the people no more remained for the RSS.
In fact opposition grew. Opposition turned more severe, when the RSS men
expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”

It scarcely matters, then, whether Nathuram Godse
retained membership in the RSS when he shot Gandhi dead. Godse was involved
in Hindu extremist organizations, including the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha,
his entire adult life, and the continuing attempts by RSS to evade responsibility
for Gandhi’s assassination are characteristic of that extreme pusillanimity
and tendency to falsehood which have always been the signal trademarks
of an organization that is determined to bring the idea of Hindu Rashtra
to fruition.